Art, Weather & Climate: 1400-1967.

Large Bathers by Paul Cezanne (French, 1839-1906), 1906

on electronic view at Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased for the W.P. Wilstach Collection

http://www.libertynet.org/~pma

Perhaps Cezanne, in recognition of his powers of meteorological observation, would have called this work Large Bathers on a Convective Day with Scattered Clouds.

Your charge, should you accept the mission, is to visit some 41 art museums in the US and eight European countries, study 12,000 paintings for their meteorological revealings, and publish your results so that this fate not befall future generations. Relax! This all happened before our current zeal for budget balancing. Art museums are usually found where there are a lot of people, people with a need for weather data. It was a marriage made in heaven. The enterprising scientists did this dirty work was Hans Neuberger. He was on the meteorological faculty at Penn State when I was there and he often visited the Botany Department to engage in interdisciplinary intercourse. He did his observation and analysis of the 12,000 paintings in 1967 and published "Climate in Art" in the British journal Weather.

A simple measure of blueness (pale, medium and dark) of painted skies was selected to minimize the ravages of age. The average blueness of many, many paintings were then converted to a percentage. Visibility or haziness was quantified in the same way using 3 classes (< 2.5 miles, 2.5 to 11 miles, and >11 miles). Cloudiness was estimated according to the UKS airways code categories: clear (<10% cloudiness), scattered (10% to 50% cloudiness), broken (50% to 90%), and overcast (>90%). Clouds were also classified into high, middle, low and convective clouds.

53% of the 12,000 paintings contained such meteorological information. Some of the outdoor paints showed no sky and most of indoor paintings had no sky visible. Thus 47% of the 12,000 paintings were enjoyed but excluded British artists, taken collectively over the centuries, would have us believe that the skies over England are overcast and low! Excellent correlation between weather station data (post-1850) and paintings data (post-1850) for both cloudiness and visibility.

Observed visibility was 33% higher than painted visibility, but given this bias, the correlation between observed and painted visibilites was 0.93 (p<.01). Likewise, the artist put on average 26% to much cloud in the sky. However, given that painted cloudiness was highly correlated with observed cloudiness (r = 0.09, p<.01). The headline is ARTISTS ARE FAITHFUL.

Neuberger, well aware of the onset of the "little ice age" or neoboreal period around 1550 AD, divided his data into three periods: 1400 AD to 1550 AD, 1550 AD to 1850 AD, and 1850 AD to 1967. He found that in the period before 1550 AD (the Pacific climate episode) that the sky were much bluer (65% compared to 50%), visibility much greater and low clouds much less common. He also observed large changes in over all cloudiness as well.

Neuberger, H. 1970. Climate in Art. Weather 25:46-56.

Bonus Reference on Art and Climate -- H. H. Lamb's "Climate, History and the Modern World" 2 Ed. routledge. London.